Asahi Glass Co.

Ensures a secure transition to the cloud with Trend Micro Deep Security

Overview

The AGC Group, which centers on Asahi Glass Co., Ltd., is a major manufacturer that boasts a significant share of the world market in its core businesses of glass, displays, and chemicals. It has offices around North America, Europe, and Asia. Over recent years, it has expanded its business into cutting edge and growth areas such as electronic materials, and the group saw total sales of 1.3483 trillion yen (for the period up to December 2014/consolidated).

Challenges

Asahi Glass (AGC) is a prominent global manufacturer of glass, and it boasts overall sales of approximately 1.35 trillion yen (full year 20 1 4). The company is also gaining attention as an organization that is actively moving its internal IT infrastructure into the cloud. As the first project in its migration to the cloud, AGC has already begun to work on its plan to run SAP solution-based mission-critical systems on Amazon Web Service (AWS), and it is aiming to start operation in 20 1 6. After this project is completed, the company plans to incrementally move other SAP solution-based system infrastructure over to AWS.

“One of the results we expect from this initiative is increased cost-performance from our IT infrastructure: we are actually predicting a saving of around 20% in infrastructure costs through this migration to AWS. In addition to this, the cloud also has the advantage of enabling to establish a disaster recovery mechanism with relatively low cost,” says Masami Mitsubori of ACG’s Information Systems Center. AGC’s goal for using the cloud does not stop here. Major goals of cloud utilization include advancing the creation of new systems that lead directly to corporate profit increases, including the Internet of Things and big data analysis.

“For our systems in the cloud, we had to ensure the same security as our on-premises systems or higher. Deep Security is the product that met this requirement.”

In moving forward with these IT reforms, AGC has placed a lot of importance on ensuring security.

“It is essential that we maintain high levels of security on company systems regardless of whether they are on-premises or in the cloud. That’s why we seek to achieve at least the same level of security for our cloud systems as we do for our on-premises systems,” says Mitsubori.

Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ was chosen by AGC as a solution that would help them meet these requirements.

Solution

There are a number of reasons why AGC decided upon Deep Security.

“One reason we selected Deep Security is because AGC has been using Trend Micro products for a long time. So we were already aware of how reliable Trend Micro’s security is,” says Tsuyoshi Fujiya of the Information Systems Center. In addition, Mitsubori goes on to say that the fact that Deep Security has already been well accepted on AWS was also a factor for choosing Deep Security.

“Looking at the success stories of business systems running on AWS, almost all of them use Deep Security. Many of our peers share the opinion that if you want to implement security solutions for the cloud then Deep Security is the best. To be honest, we didn’t even consider anything other than Deep Security.” In terms of functionality, Deep Security also matched AGC’s requirements.

"With Deep Security, we firmly believe that it is possible to extend gap-free security plan to servers in the cloud.”

“We placed a lot of importance on security solutions such as antivirus and vulnerability protection to protect servers on AWS with attacks that exploit vulnerabilities increase numbers and at a faster rate, putting in place solutions to fight these attacks was an urgent task for us. That’s why using Deep Security’s virtual patching functionality to detect packets that target a vulnerability and swiftly block them was very attractive to us,” says Tsutomu Asanuma of the Information Systems Center.

Yet another reason that AGC highly rated Deep Security was because of the solution’s ability to handle multiple operating systems including Windows Server and Linux. “All of AGC’s mission-critical systems are based on Windows Server, and even after the migration to AWS, basically this did not change. However, from the start, we planned to use Linux for additional systems to be constructed on AWS. That’s why the ability to protect Linux environments was a major consideration during selection,” says Mitsubori.

AGC already has approximately 120 virtual servers running on AWS and approximately 50 of them are for business critical systems. Almost all of these servers run a Deep Security agent, which is being used to expand security solutions such as antivirus and vulnerability protection.

Results

As of July 2015, AGC had just started security operations with Deep Security, but already there was a feeling that it was going to have the desired effect. “Deep Security has a wide variety of functions, including virtual patching and centralized management. Furthermore, it also supports Auto Scaling of servers in the cloud. So there is no need to worry that we may have forgotten to apply security solutions when extending servers. With the implementation of Deep Security, we believe we have been able to roll out security without leaving any security gaps,” says Asanuma. In addition, Mitsubori goes on to say; “It’s relatively easy to start using cloud services, but there’s a concern: it’s difficult to implement company-wide control over its usage. As such, it is very significant that we decided to include Deep Security in our basic configuration to support our fundamental company-wide policy for cloud usage. With this, we should be able to maintain a level of security for cloud usage throughout the company.”

AGC also plans to extend Deep Security to its on-premises servers. Fujiya explains this by summing up as follows.

“Honestly to say, we have been looking into the application of Deep Security to on-premises servers for a long time, quite separately from our plan for the cloud. We plan to deploy and manage Deep Security Agent for on-premises servers from AWS to establish the central management, regardless of whether a server is on-premises or in the cloud. By unifying security management of all servers within the company’s IT infrastructure, we hope to increase efficiency when expanding security solutions and during operation. And we hope this will further enhance our security.”

AGC’s management vision declares that it will untiringly pursue revolution, and the switching of IT infrastructure to the cloud can be described as the embodiment of this philosophy in terms of its IT policy. Deep Security will henceforth continue to support AGC’s initiatives toward these bold IT reforms.

“We are going to implement comprehensive protection for our cloud and on-premises servers with Deep Security. This should lead to increased security operational efficiency and enhancement.”